- Cooling costs rise as Nvidia pushes power limits on successive generations of racks
- Compute trays dominate spending due to increasing cold plate requirements and thermal density
- Savings on switching trays cannot offset the growing demand for high-power GPU trays
The cost of cooling Nvidia’s high-end rack systems continues to rise as each generation reaches extreme power levels.
A report from Morgan Stanley obtained by @Jukanlosreve reveals that the liquid cooling hardware inside the GB300 NVL72 costs $49,860, or about enough to buy a new Tesla Model Y.
The report further estimates that the liquid cooling system required for the new Vera Rubin NVL144 configuration will approach $55,710, an increase of 17%.
The economics of tray-level cooling
This platform depends on hotter Rubin GPUs, with power up to 1,800 W per unit, as well as next-generation NVSwitch 6.0 components.
The cost of cooling this system is tied to individual compute trays, and each compute tray will require larger capacity cold plates.
The cost per compute platter is expected to increase by 18% to approximately $2,660 – and since the Vera Rubin NVL144 system has 18 platters, the total cooling expense on the compute side reaches approximately $47,880.
The increase comes from higher-capacity cold plates, which climb up to $400 per unit as CPUs and GPUs push thermal limits.
Meanwhile, switching tray cooling appears less expensive, dropping to $870 per tray and totaling $7,830 per rack.
However, this This reduction is dwarfed by the much larger increase on the compute side, as the cost trajectory follows a pattern: the GB200 NVL72 transition resulted in a 20% increase in cooling demands for the GB300 NVL72.
Likewise, switching from the GB300 NVL72 to the Vera Rubin NVL144 adds another 17%. Power levels explain this trend.
Each Blackwell Ultra data center GPU consumes 1,400 W, a Grace CPU consumes 300 W, and memory contributes 200 W per socket.
As workloads increase, the value of precision cooling increases just as quickly, but future systems will make this even worse. Nvidia plans to upgrade to Rubin Ultra GPUs that could achieve 3,600W thermal power per case, and meeting that requirement could require new types of cold plates or more aggressive cooling techniques.
Nvidia is also preparing the liquid-cooled NVL576 “Kyber” system, which will feature 144 GPU packages and offer higher performance than the Vera Rubin NVL144, while carrying an even higher cooling bill.
Although the final amount is not confirmed, the high-capacity plates capable of dissipating 3.6 kW of heat will clearly exceed the current $400 per unit.
This sends a signal that future data center installations will face even higher thermal expenses.
Via Toms Hardware
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